Bank charges, free school meals, warrant sales, homelessness and breastfeeding are just some of the issues into which Mike Dailly has waded in recent years. Now the principal solicitor at Glasgow's Govan Law Centre is levelling his sights on a new target: property factors.
Sitting in his office - where paperwork landslides threaten from all directions - Dailly says GLC has seen an increasing number of clients complaining of unfair charges and questionable practices by the companies hired to do communal cleaning and maintenance work around their shared buildings. As a result, Dailly is now helping to write a bill supported by Maryhill MSP Patricia Ferguson to impose some regulation upon this industry.
"It is one of the biggest scams we have going on right now," said Dailly, who is currently representing a number of people from a tenement on Glasgow's South Side in a dispute with their factor.
Dailly said his clients had agreed with their factor to have a specified amount of work done at a set price. When additional work was carried out at substantial extra cost, residents refused to pay on the basis that they had not authorised the work.
The factor is now charging the residents interest of 34% APR on that debt, and as this is within its current legal rights, the management firm is also sending residents reminder notices every five days at an extra cost of £17.62 per letter. The residents are not able to hire a new firm, as their factor has written a clause into the contract which says it cannot be sacked when money is still owed.
"The problem with the factors is that they are, by and large, totally unregulated," Dailly said. "I know this is all founded upon a scam. I am convinced of it."
Not surprisingly, "fairness" is a concept at the heart of everything Dailly does. The 39-year-old has spent nearly all of his 15-year career in community legal work, and since joining GLC in September 1999, he has pushed beyond the traditional role of solicitor to become a campaigner for social justice.
Dailly said this evolution made sense, as many of the problems encountered by the law centre's clients are rooted in flawed systems and legislation. Rather than just fire- fighting individual cases, it was only logical to address these wider problems.
"You have got to have a bigger attitude," he said. "If you are going to get things done, you have got to look at the bigger picture."
He began writing his first piece of legislation, The Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Bill, not long after joining GLC from the Legal Services Agency in Glasgow. Dailly wanted the Govan centre to become more proactive, and it was decided to put GLC information leaflets through the letterboxes of all homes in the area.
"Everyone knows there is a great need out there," he said. "Everyone knows there are people out there who desperately need help, but you can't expect them to come to you."
The result was a jump in the number of people coming into the GLC's Burleigh Street office, many of whom had poindings and warrants against them. Dailly noticed that a large proportion of these people were on benefits, but were still being pursued by the council for water and sewerage charges, for which they were liable despite receiving benefits.
"One of the things that most motivated me when I arrived here was seeing all these elderly people with tears coming down their faces saying: Oh son, I've got this poinding against me, what am I going to do?' "In this situation, they would typically be asked to pay half their debt, but they just simply don't have it. So what are they expected to do - go to some dodgy money lender?
"It is all about the unfairness of pushing people into legal corners."
Dailly is no stranger to the circumstances that contribute to many of his clients' legal problems. He describes his own upbringing as "pretty solid working class", having grown up in the Whitfield area of Dundee, one of the first places in Scotland to be targeted for urban regeneration and renewal.
"In some respects I think that instills in you a sense of social justice," he said. "Seeing areas become ghettos, and realising they don't have to become ghettos, that really makes you think about right and wrong."
While some friends and acquaintances were sucked into the predictable downward spiral of poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, the young Dailly avoided this in part through his interest in music. He played guitar for local bands Citizen Kane and The Very Important Men, and by the age of 15 was touring regularly.
"That was a great experience," he said. "You get to meet all these different people, and you realise there is this whole other world out there."
Dailly also came to realise that many of the problems faced by people from areas like Whitfield were the same as the difficulties encountered by those across all class boundaries, the only difference being that those from poorer backgrounds have less of a safety net to fall back on.
At any point in time, GLC has in the region of 1700 active cases on the go, many of which are centred around problems with housing, employment and debt. More often than not, the cause can be traced back to a breadwinner coming down with a long-term illness, or the break-up of a relationship, leading to a division of debts that individuals are unable to cope with.
"I think people sometimes like to think that the reason a person gets into financial difficulty and might lose their house is because they have been silly in some sort of way," Dailly said. "I think the reason we sometimes like to think that is because it gives us comfort.
"But the typical case that we see, that is not what is going on. These kinds of things could happen to anybody."
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